Genre(s) in the Making
Diction, Audience and Text in the Old English Seafarer
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3169104 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John Miles Foley (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1983 |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 683 |
| Publication date | 1983-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Poetics Today (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0333-5372 • E-ISSN: 1527-5507 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1772320 |
| OpenAlex | W2318558649 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 18 |
recorded on folios 81b--83a of the Old English Exeter Book manuscript, conventionally and perhaps unfortunately called The Seafarer,' have generated as much critical disagreement per verse as any work in the Anglo-Saxon poetic canon. And yet almost all editors and commentators involved in its study have heaped one enthusiastic evaluation after another on this their bugbear, professing to sense, however individualistically, something of enduring quality, something of deep and familiar resonance even for our very modern and very un-Anglo-Saxon sensibility. Responses to the poem's problematic structure have ranged from Rieger's (1869) initial hypothesis of a dialogue between two speakers, through Pope's (1965, 1974) and Greenfield's (1966, 1969, 1972, 1974) instructive flyting over the dramatic voices versus the single narrator theories, through Stevick's (1965) opinion that our manuscript's apparent lack of unity identifies it as a draft needing a final polishing, and on to Mandel's (1976) recent claim that the poem has a defined, apprehendable structure after all.2 On the closely related question of genre, many scholars have termed the poem an elegy, though often without much of a consensus on what that label should mean; in
Art · Diction · Linguistics · Literature · Poetry · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy
The making of Homeric verse
Essential Articles for the Study of Old English Poetry
The Development of Germanic Verse Form
Second thoughts on the interpretation of The Seafarer
Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry
Oral Poetry in the Seafarer
Oral Delivery in the Middle Ages
Another Look at Oral Poetry in the Seafarer
Homer and Irish Heroic Narrative
Ishmael's White World
"The Winged Word. A Study in the Technique of Ancient Greek Oral Composition as Seen Principally through Hesiod's "Works and Days
Greek Poetry 2000–700 B.C
Generative composition in Beowulf
Old English formulas and systems
From Hi(story) to Poem, or the Paths of Pun
Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory
Indo-European and Indo-Europeans
Mervelous Signals
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |